Playing Games at PAX, Part One: Lighter Fare

Wasabi!: Scrabble meets Sushi

Over at Z-Man Games, I got to try out a game I’d heard of but never played: Wasabi! It’s a little bit like playing Scrabble with sushi ingredients. You get three ingredient tiles, three recipes (between two and five ingredients each), and get to play one tile at a time on the board. Complete a recipe and you score; complete it with style by having all the ingredients in the proper order, and you get little wasabi cubes that are worth extra points at the end of the game. There are also bonus cards that allow you to stack, swap, or remove ingredients, play two ingredients in a turn, or even block out spaces on the board that can’t be used.

As you can see from the photo, the game is a delight to look at—the board looks like the bamboo sushi mats and the ingredients are colorfully rendered. I love the fact that it comes with the little plastic saucers, and the green wooden wasabi cubes are exactly the right color. What I didn’t get in the photo is the menus: each player gets a little menu card which hides their three recipes. The production value on the game is excellent, and the gameplay is a lot of fun as well. I played once at the Z-Man Games booth, and then at the end of the weekend Dave picked up a copy and we played again. Wasabi! is definitely one I’m adding to my wish list.

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Jonathan H. Liu

Jonathan H. Liu is a stay-at-home dad in Portland, Oregon, who loves to read, is always up for a board game, and has a bit of a Kickstarter habit. I can be reached at jonathan at geekdad dot com.